Vocabulary for IELTS Advanced: A review

Is the book Vocabulary for IELTS Advanced suitable for you?

To get a better idea of whether this book will help you with your IELTS preparation, read my review of the book below.

What I like about Vocabulary for IELTS Advanced:

What I most like about this book is that it includes vocabulary on a variety of common IELTS topics, including study and work, travel and tourism, technology, crime and punishment, and government.

To keep you interested and to show you how the vocabulary can be used in the IELTS test, each of the 25 units includes a variety of vocabulary exercises and IELTS tasks.

The book includes some useful IELTS test tips. My favourite tip: If you need to get a band 6.5 or above for your writing, check your writing for the most common spelling mistakes made by IELTS band score 6.0 candidates (i.e. ‘their‘, ‘government‘, ‘environment‘, ‘which‘, ‘until‘, ‘believe‘ and ‘nowadays‘).

The book highlights some vocabulary mistakes that many IELTS candidates make. One of these mistakes is that a lot of candidates say ‘in the internet‘ instead of ‘on the internet‘.

The practice test questions that I tried are generally at a similar level of difficulty to the ones in real IELTS tests.

The book contains lots of ideas about how you can remember new vocabulary.

What I don’t like about Vocabulary for IELTS Advanced:

I was disappointed to see that some of the IELTS writing samples in the book include features that could negatively affect your band score if you were to write in a similar way in your test. In one of the IELTS Writing Task 2 essays, for example, there aren’t enough paragraphs to clearly show the different parts of the essay.

I also think there could have been more photographs to illustrate the vocabulary and to make the book more interesting to look at.

Who Vocabulary for IELTS Advanced is suitable for:

If you’re preparing for the IELTS Academic test and you know that you need to improve your vocabulary, then this would be a useful book for you to use. As well as presenting a lot of very useful vocabulary in a variety of ways, it also includes practice in IELTS Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking.

The book does state, however, that it’s designed for students at upper-intermediate or advanced level who are preparing for the IELTS Academic test. If you’re not at that level, you may feel overwhelmed by the number of new words and phrases in this book.

An IELTS candidate’s opinion:

Here’s what an IELTS candidate I know said about the book:

“The good thing about the book is that it pays a lot of attention to synonyms and parallel expressions [i.e. words and phrases that have similar meanings] so through the whole book you notice how these things are used in listening, reading and speaking as well, which is very, very good.

Another good thing about the book is that it uses the IELTS format so, at the same time as learning vocabulary, you practice listening, reading, writing and speaking.

There’s some advice regarding IELTS tasks and how to deal with them, which I find useful and interesting, and I think that for people who have just started preparing for the IELTS examination the advice is really useful.

Some words, however, are simply listed and given out of context and in some cases it’s difficult to make out how to use them in connection with the particular topic so some extra exercises illustrating the usage of these words would do some good”.

If you’ve already used the book yourself or if you have any questions about the book, let me know what you think in the comments section below.